Evidence of the impacts of public e-procurement: The Portuguese experience

•Public e-procurement is discussed and analysed.•Two surveys on public e-procurement impacts are presented and discussed.•Impacts of mandatory adoption of public e-procurement are analysed.•Benefits of e-procurement for public sector are analysed.

This paper analyses public e-procurement implementation and emphasizes its main difficulties and impacts in relation to the type of public organizations. The primary impacts and changes in the Portuguese public sector are analyzed within the new legal framework, which adopts mandatory e-procurement for any open, restricted or negotiated procedure. In this sense, two surveys carried out in consecutive years were conducted to assess the implementation difficulties and impact of e-procurement in the Portuguese public sector.The major value of this research is that it presents and discusses, for the first time, evidences about difficulties and impacts on the mandatory adoption of public e-procurement, based on the case of Portugal. The results show that the entities’ administrative level influences the e-procurement implementation, which is influenced by the innovation adoption process.